Self's punishment (21 page)

8

On the Scheffel Terrace

Professor Kirchenberg was willing to see me straight away when he heard it had to do with Sergej. ‘The poor boy, and you want to help him. Then come round right now. I’m in the Palais Boisserée all afternoon.’

From the press coverage of a trial involving the German department, I knew it was housed in the Palais Boisserée. The professors considered themselves rightful descendants of the early princely residents. When rebellious students had profaned the palais, an example had been made of them with the help of the law.

Kirchenberg was particularly princely in his professorial manner. He had thinning hair, contact lenses, a gorged, pink face, and, in spite of his tendency to corpulence, he moved with a light-footed elegance. As a greeting he clasped my hand in both of his. ‘Isn’t it simply shocking what has befallen Sergej?’

I replied with my queries about Sergej’s state of mind, career plans, finances.

He leaned back in his armchair. ‘Serjoscha has been shaped by his difficult youth. The years between eight and fourteen in Roth, a bigoted garrison town in Franken, were sheer martyrdom for the child. A father who could only live out his homoeroticism in military power postures, a mother as busy as a bee, good-hearted, utterly weak-willed. And the tramp, tramp, tramp,’ he drummed his knuckles on the desktop, ‘of soldiers marching in and out every day. Listen hard.’ With one hand he made a gesture commanding my silence, with the other he kept up the drumming. Slowly the hand grew still. Kirchenberg sighed. ‘It’s only with me that he’s been able to work through those years.’

When I broached the suspicion of self-mutilation, Kirchenberg was beside himself. ‘That’s so laughable, it’s ridiculous. Sergej has a very loving relationship with his body, almost narcissistic. Amid all the prejudices doing the rounds about us gays, surely this much at least is understood, that we take better care of our bodies than the average heterosexual. We are our body, Herr Self.’

‘Was Sergej Mencke really gay, then?’

‘Such prejudice in your questions,’ said Kirchenberg, almost pityingly. ‘You’ve never sat on the Scheffel Terrace reading Stefan George. Do it sometime. Then perhaps you’ll feel that homoeroticism isn’t a question of being, but rather of becoming. Sergej isn’t, he’s becoming.’

I took my leave from Professor Kirchenberg and passed Mischkey’s apartment on the way to the castle. And I did spend a little time on the Scheffel Terrace. I was cold. Or was I becoming cold? There was no becoming going on, perhaps I couldn’t expect it without Stefan George.

In Café Gundel their special Christmas cookies, embossed with local sights, were on display already. I purchased a bagful, intending to surprise Judith with them on the journey to Locarno.

Back in the office everything ran like clockwork. From Information I obtained the telephone number of the Catholic priest’s office in Roth; the chaplain was only too happy to interrupt his sermon preparation to inform me that the leader of the Catholic Scout troop in Roth since time immemorial had been Joseph Maria Jungbluth, senior teacher. I reached Senior Teacher Jungbluth immediately thereafter. He said he’d be glad to meet me the next day in the early afternoon to talk about little Siegfried.

Judith had fixed a date with Tyberg for Sunday afternoon, and we decided to travel on Saturday. ‘Tyberg looks forward to meeting you.’

9

And then there were three

Mannheim to Nürnberg on the new autobahn should take two hours. The Schwabach/Roth exit comes thirty kilometres before Nürnberg. One day Roth will lie on the Augsburg– Nürnberg autobahn. I won’t be around then.

Fresh snow had fallen in the night. On the journey I had the choice of two open lanes, a well-worn one on the right and a narrow one for overtaking. Passing a truck was a lurching adventure. Three and a half hours later, I arrived. In Roth there are a couple of half-timbered houses, a few sandstone buildings, the Evangelical and the Catholic churches, pubs that have adapted themselves to military needs, and lots of barracks. Not even a local patriot could describe Roth as the Pearl of Franken. It was just before one and I picked an inn. In the Roter Hirsch, which had resisted the trend for fast food and had even retained its old furnishings, the proprietor did the cooking himself. I asked the waitress for a typically Bavarian dish. She didn’t understand my request. ‘Bavarian? We’re in Franken.’ So I asked her to recommend a typical dish from Franken. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Our entire menu is Frankish. Including the coffee.’ Helpful breed of folk here. Pot luck. I ordered
Saure Zipfel
with fried potatoes, and a dark beer.

Saure Zipfel
are bratwurst, but they’re not fried, they’re heated up in a stock of vinegar, onions, and spices. And they taste like it, too. The fried potatoes were deliciously crispy. The waitress softened enough to point out the way to Allersberger Strasse where Senior Teacher Jungbluth lived.

Jungbluth opened the door in civilian clothes. In my mind’s eye I’d pictured him in long socks, knee-length brown trousers, blue neckerchief, and a wide-brimmed scout’s hat. He couldn’t recall the scout camp at which the young Mencke wore a real or pretend bandage to shirk washing-up duty. But he remembered other incidents.

‘Siegfried liked getting out of chores. In school, as well, where he was in my class in the first and second year. You know, he was a frightened child – and a cringing one. I don’t understand much about medicine, beyond first aid, of course, which I need as senior teacher and scoutmaster. But I would think you need a certain level of courage for self-mutilation, and I can’t imagine Siegfried having that courage. Now his father, on the other hand, he’s made of different stuff.’

He was showing me to the door when he remembered something else. ‘Would you like to see some photos?’ The pictures in the album were of various combinations of scouts, tents, campfires, bicycles. I saw children singing, laughing, and fooling around, but I could also see in their eyes that the snapshots were engineered by Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘That’s Siegfried.’ He pointed to a rather frail blond boy with a reticent look on his face. A few photos later I came across him again. ‘What’s wrong with his leg?’ His left leg was in plaster. ‘Right,’ said Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘An unpleasant story. For six months the accident insurance tried to stick me with negligence. But Siegfried just had a careless fall when we were in the stalagmite caves in Pottenstein, and broke his leg. I can’t be everywhere at once.’ He looked at me seeking agreement. I was glad to concur.

On the way home, I took stock. Not much remained to be done on the Sergej Mencke case. I still wanted to take a look at Philipp’s young scholar’s thesis, and I’d saved my visit to Sergej in the hospital for last. I was tired of them all, the senior teachers, the army captains, the gay German professors, the whole ballet scene, and Sergej too, even before I’d seen him. Had I grown weary of my profession? In the Mischkey case I’d already let my professional standards drop, and as for my distaste for the Mencke case, it wouldn’t have been there before. Should I call it quits? Did I want to live beyond eighty anyway? I could get my life insurance paid out, that would feed me for twelve years. I decided to talk to my tax adviser and insurance agent in the new year.

I drove westwards, into the setting sun. As far as my eye could see the snow gleamed in a rosy hue. The sky was tinted the blue of pale porcelain. In the Franken villages and small towns I drove past, smoke unfurled from the chimneys. The homely light in the windows rekindled old desires for security. Homesick for Nowhere.

Philipp was still on duty when I looked him up in the station at seven. ‘Willy is dead,’ he greeted me dejectedly. ‘The idiot. To die of a burst appendix these days is just ridiculous. I don’t understand why he didn’t call me; he must have been in terrible pain.’

‘You know, Philipp, I’ve often had the impression in the years since Hilde’s death that he didn’t actually have the will to live.’

‘These silly husbands and widowers. If he’d just said the word, I know women who’d make him forget any number of Hildes. What’s become of your Brigitte, by the way?’

‘She’s running around in Rio. When’s the funeral?’

‘A week from today. Two p.m. at the main cemetery in Ludwigshafen. I had to see to it all. There’s no one else. Would a red sandstone gravestone with a screech owl on it meet with your approval? We’ll pool resources, you, Eberhard, and me, so that he gets planted decently.’

‘Have you thought of the announcements? And we’ll have to inform the dean of his old faculty. Could your secretary do that?’

‘That’s fine. I wish I could join you to have a bite to eat. But I can’t get away. Don’t forget the dissertation.’

And then there were three. No more Doppelkopf. I went home and opened a can of sardines. I wanted to try empty sardine cans on my Christmas tree this year and had to start collecting them. It was almost too late to get enough together before Christmas. Should I invite Philipp and Eberhard next Friday for a funeral feast of sardines in oil?

‘Door-Induced Fractures’ was fifty pages long. The system underlying the work emerged as a combination of doors and breaks. The introduction contained a diagram, the horizontal of which depicted the various fracture-inducing doors, and the vertical the door-induced fractures. Most of the 196 squares contained figures revealing how often the corresponding constellation had cropped up at the city hospital in the last twenty years.

I looked for the line ‘car door’ and the column ‘tibia fracture’. At the point they met I found the number 2 and afterwards in the text the respective case histories. Although all names had been removed I recognized Sergej’s in one. The other dated back to 1972. A nervous cavalier, while helping his lady into the car, had shut the door too swiftly. The study could only cite one case of self-mutilation. A failed goldsmith had hoped to gain heaps of gold with his insured, and broken, right thumb. In the furnace cellar he had placed his right hand in the frame of the iron door and slammed it shut with his left. The affair only came apart because, with the insurance money already paid, he had bragged about his coup. He told the police that as a child he’d attached his wobbly milk-teeth to the door handle with a thread and pulled them out. That’s what had given him the idea.

The decision to call Frau Mencke and enquire about young Siegfried’s methods of tooth extraction was one I put on ice.

Yesterday I’d been too tired to stay up to watch
Flashdance
, borrowed from the video rental on Seckenheimer Strasse. Now I slid in the cassette. Afterwards I danced under the shower. Why hadn’t I stayed longer in Pittsburgh?

10

Stop thief

In Basle Judith and I took our first break. We drove off the autobahn into town and parked on Münster-Platz. It was covered in snow and was free of aggravating Christmas decorations. We walked a few steps to Café Spielmann, found a table by the window, and had a view over the Rhine and the bridge with the small chapel in the middle.

‘Now tell me in detail how you set this up with Tyberg,’ I asked Judith over a bowl of muesli, which was particularly delicious here, with lots of cream and without an overabundance of oat flakes.

‘During the centenary when I was assigned to him he invited me to look him up if I was ever in Locarno. I mentioned this and said I had to chauffeur my elderly uncle,’ she placed a soothing hand on mine, ‘to look for a holiday home there. I added that he knew this elderly uncle from the war years.’ Judith was proud of her diplomatic move. I was concerned.

‘Won’t Tyberg throw me out on the spot when he recognizes me as the former Nazi prosecutor? Wouldn’t it have been better to have told him straight out?’

‘I did consider it, but then perhaps he wouldn’t even have let the former Nazi prosecutor over his threshold.’

‘And why elderly uncle, actually, and not elderly friend?’

‘That smacks of lover. I think Tyberg was interested in me as a woman, and perhaps he wouldn’t see me if he thought I was firmly attached to someone else, especially if I brought this someone with me. You are a sensitive private detective.’

‘Yes. I’m perfectly willing to face up to the responsibility of having been Tyberg’s prosecutor. But should I confess to him in one fell swoop that I’m your lover, not your uncle?’

‘Are you asking me?’ She said it abruptly yet playfully, and got out her knitting as though settling down to a longer discussion.

I lit a cigarette. ‘You’ve interested me as a woman time and again, and now I wonder whether I was just an old dodderer to you, avuncular and sexless.’

‘What are you after now? “You’ve interested me as a woman time and again.” If you were interested in me in the past then leave it. If you’re interested in the present then say so. You always prefer taking responsibility for the past rather than for the present.’ Knit two, purl two.

‘I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you, Judith.’

‘Listen, Gerd, of course I see you as a man, and I like you as a man. It never went far enough for me to make the first move. And certainly not in the past few weeks. But what sort of agonized first move is this, or isn’t it one? “I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you” when you obviously have an enormous problem just squeezing that roundabout, cautious sentence out. Come on, let’s get going.’ She wrapped the started pullover sleeve round the needles and wound more wool round it.

My mind went blank. I felt humiliated. We didn’t exchange a word all the way to Olten.

Judith had found Dvořák’s Cello Concerto on the radio and was knitting.

What had actually humiliated me? Judith had only hit me around the head with what I’d felt myself in recent months: the lack of clarity in my feelings towards her. But she’d done it so unkindly by quoting myself back at me that I felt exposed and skewered. I told her so near Zofingen.

She let her knitting sink to her lap and stared out in front of her at the road for a long while.

‘When I was an executive assistant I so often encountered men who wanted something from me, but didn’t put themselves on the line. They’d like to have something going with me, but at the same time they’d pretend they didn’t. They’d arrange things so they could immediately retreat without getting really involved. It seemed to me that was the lie of the land with you, as well. You make the first move, but perhaps it isn’t really one, a gesture that costs you nothing and has no risk attached. You talk about humiliation . . . I didn’t want to humiliate you. Oh, shit, why are the only little wounds you notice your own?’ She turned her head away. It sounded as if she was crying. But I couldn’t see.

By Lucerne it was getting dark. When we reached Wassen I didn’t want to drive any further. The autobahn was cleared, but it had started snowing. I knew the Hotel des Alpes from earlier Adriatic expeditions. There, still, in Reception was the cage with the Indian mynah bird. When it saw us, it squawked, ‘Stop thief, stop thief.’

At dinner we had the creamy Zürcher Geschnetzeltes and diced roast potatoes. During the drive we had started to argue about whether success inevitably leads an artist to despise his audience. Röschen had once told me about a concert of Serge Gainsbourg’s in Paris where the more contemptuously Gainsbourg treated the audience, the more appreciatively they applauded. Since then this question has preoccupied me, and expanded in my mind into the larger problem of whether one can grow old without despising people either. Judith put up a lengthy resistance to this argument about the link between artistic success and scorn of others. Over the third glass of Fendant she gave in. ‘You’re right, Beethoven went deaf, after all. Deafness is the perfect expression of contempt for one’s environment.’

In my monastic single room I slept a sound, deep sleep. We set off early for Locarno. When we drove out of the Gotthard tunnel, winter was over.